Clew

First-time novelist Jooste blends story lines and perspectives in this awkwardly tender love story. Theo, an English professor whose creative work has ground to a halt, is newly divorced and new in town, far from his ex-wife, their son and everything he expected his life to be; Isabelle, an art teacher, obsesses over the death of her childhood sweetheart and her father's retelling of the myth of the labyrinth of Crete. She draws endless pictures of herself as Ariadne, but Theo is no Theseus. Instead, he begins to write about the Minotaur's struggle to escape the maze in which he has been imprisoned. Jooste tosses out plenty of clever, memorable lines that nonetheless fail to assemble into a coherent whole, and the typographical tricks that blur the lines between Isabelle and Ariadne and between Theo and the Minotaur provide too much of a narrative crutch, limiting the reader's involvement and leaching the poignancy from the otherwise moving conclusion. (Nov.)